Thirty
artists whose works belong to the collections of both Museum der Moderne and
the Generali Foundation review the social changing in our recent times and its
responses. Poetics of change starts from the premise that poetics
respond to conceptual art’s lack of aesthetic qualities. A series of 22 photomontages titled Elke Krystufek reads Otto Weininger
(1993), hang from the ceiling, allowing for the works to be viewed on both
sides while only one work is mounted on the opposite wall. Sex with cartoon
characters never seemed more fun than in this piece, where the Pink Panther
touches the naked female body of a cut-out image from a porn magazine. Almost
all works incorporate depictions of women from porn magazines and superimposed
text extracts by not so popular with gender politics, the Austrian philosopher
Otto Weininger. Krystufek’s take on gender and sexuality within the Austrian
context, introduces female characters, worthy of Russ Meyer’s oversexed power girls. If innocence is there to be lost and never
regained, why not take control of our own female representations?

Austrian artist Arnulf
Rainer’s Face Grimaces (1969–1970), a series of 12 black-and-white photographs of himself pulling faces, bear the stamp of
the Situationists’ Aktions. Had they been made now, they could have added to different ways
of avoiding face recognition on and offline within the current era ridden with
surveillance. Like in Krystufek’s montages, the installation of Face Grimaces allows for
one work to stand out, a photograph painted over with heavy black paint
strokes. On both instances the choice of setting apart two works grant them
status of singularity and insularity; or perhaps they become written
announcements, posters like for the respective series.

Portfolio of
Doggedness (1968) stays within the realm of direct art and it
documentsVALIE EXPORT barely containing her laughter taking Peter
Weibel for a walk on a leash through the streets of Vienna. Mobile office
(1969) is an inflatable, transparent little tower to fit one person, a type
writer, a phone and an agenda. It becomes an anticipation of our current
lifestyle where administration tasks confuse leisure and work time. The
Viennese architect/artist Hans
Hollein’s intention was to offer a quite humorous
alternative to architecture’s obsession with building houses for sale. Another
temporary construction of similar size but in a see-through red tent decorated
with tiny, hand knitted boots, which gives it an Oriental twist. It houses a
small figurine featuring pre-historic motifs drawn on the base supporting two
tiny tiger-like animals in motion. Brazilian Henna Night (2014) is only
one of the four works the Turkish artist Nilbar Güreș features in the show. The
Red Tent (1997) is also a novel by Anita Diamant, set in during the First
Testament time. The red tent is a place occupied only by women while
menstruating or giving birth, a place of comfort and mutual understanding,
similarly to today’s Damascus, which is mainly inhabited by women since men
enrolled in the army or became refugees.

As opposed to the American conceptual artists interested in
the dematerialization of art as a critique of the market, it appears that humor
allowed the Actionists to dismantle formalism in quite different ways. The more
clinical and cold conceptual art the show claims to challenge is represented by
the German-born, US-based artist Hans Haacke (1936) who re-enacts a much older
work, which introduced statistics into the arts for perhaps the first time. The
visitors are asked to fill in a questionnaire related to ethics within art and
education institutions. The responses are pinned up on the wall, facing the
sculpture Ice Table (1967). At first, this approx one square meterof
white-ish masse sitting on a metal pedestal indicates a whole range of possible
materials from marble to plastic or salt. Upon closer inspection it proves to
be ice and the metal pedestal is a fridge, which keeps this oversized ice cube
alive. Haacke’s sculpture is analogous to the power structure maintaining the
existing institutions whereas the ice stays cool as long as the power structure
is preserved.

For better or worse, the change in Europe is in the air and
circling around such redundant discussions like analysis versus beauty or
thought versus desire seems increasingly alienating. In addition, humor
surfaces as an unintended thread, which pushes the Austrian artists associated
with Actionists into a different direction, freeing it from the so-called
rational aesthetics, announced by the curatorial team.